In that book, they record the stories of Civil Rights activists, Vietnam vets, women active in the women’s movement, campus activists, and people in the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], Weathermen, and Black Panthers. Additionally, there is an entire section entitled, “The War at Home.” As they write in their foreward, the book is an attempt “to give some idea of what it was like to be living then, to add a human dimension to the black headlines and shocking scenes of those years.”

I think that’s what Home Front Girl shows too: for the young Joan, the home front did not start on December 7, 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It already began after World War I, the so-called “Great War,” and never let up until a “hot war” with bullets being shot recommenced.